In no particular order:
Runners Up Award
The O'Jays - Ship Ahoy
Philadephia International Records (PIR) had already had some monster hits with the O'Jays. 1972 had seen the release of Backstabbers, which contained two monster hits - the title track and the evergreen Love Train, which pointed the way towards disco. This album has only the one massive hit, Now That We've Found Love, but is quite likely the better album.
It's cooler and heavier. Check out the intro to For the Love of Money. It's been sampled to death of course, but how cool is that bass line? The title track is a lengthy vocal workout, one a slow, mid-tempo groove. There are a couple of up-tempo tracks; Put Your Hands Together is made for the dancefloor and People Keep Tellin' Me is a 70s throwback to Motown rhythms. So musically, it's cool, but a key element of what's cool about this is that it is evidence of the socially conscious dimension of Gamble and Huff's label. It's easy to think that PIR is all love songs, but here it's about the people. Even the massive single, which sounds like a love song, isn't. Rather than the finding of love within a couple, it's societal - once we overcome our differences and cease to be divided as a community, what are we to do then? How will we make the best of it?
Runners Up Award
Gary Higgins - Red Hash
And it's gorgeous. It's sitting in the same sort of West Coast folk rock tradition as Dave Crosby (despite being 2000 miles East). It's all acoustic guitars, flutes, occasional strings and sweet melodies. It has a melancholic tone - tales of loss and fear, space and openness. This is not urban music. It is a record for quiet nights in. I don't smoke dope anymore - it's been a very long time. Nonetheless, I'd suggest that if I did, this would go down very nicely.
The Award for The Album That Could Benefit the Most From a Quick Edit
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Don't get me wrong, this is a very good album and it has some of Elton's very best songs on it. Bennie and the Jets is incredible, the title track is phenomenal. Candle in the Wind is a beautiful to tribute to Marilyn Monroe so long as you can convince yourself to forget that it was ever associated with Diana. And we could carry on. Of the albums 17 tracks, I'd suggest that there's half a dozen gems and probably another half dozen songs that if not gems, are still pretty incredible.
But then there's a handful of songs that should never have made it this far. Social Disease is often commented upon as a song that should not be here, but my personal least favourite is Jamaica Jerk-off. Cod-reggae is never a good look and singing about jerking off is not going to make up for that. There's also something a bit off about All The Girls Love Alice. It's a story about a straight girl who prostitutes herself to ageing lesbians until she kills herself. I can live without that. All in all, these tracks are faltering steps in an otherwise great album.
The Award for the Unjustly Maligned
Yoko Ono - Approximately Infinite Universe
Amongst the things that annoy me in the universe - and despite my efforts it's a long list - one seems to occur more often than makes sense - it is total assassination of Yoko Ono. Sure, she's avant garde and difficult; she's not for everyone - she'll never be mainstream (whatever that is). But let me speak frankly - the criticisms of her whiff a little of ignorance, misogyny and perhaps even racism*. Like most artists on the fringes, what she does is not easily accessible and sometimes appears absurd or at least jarringly different. When it is placed against the traditional it is doubly jarring - such as the famous clip of her joining in with Memphis Tennessee alongside John and Chuck Berry. Even I'll admit that Berry's reaction when Ono comes in is pretty funny. But it does not constitute a dismissal of what she does.
This dismissal is tragic. She was an fascinating artist and made several records that contribute interesting and important elements to contemporary rock music - especially music created and performed by women. Unsurprisingly, she is held as a key influence by many female artists from the 80s onwards - Kim Gordon, Kim Deal, Cat Power, Peaches and so on (check out the list of people that have sought to collaborate with her!)
Approximately Infinite Universe comes at a turning point in her career. She has not abandoned the out and out avant-garde that is characteristic of Fly or Plastic Ono Band (with John Lennon), but she is turning towards more straightforward song forms. It's not absent, but the stereotype of her shriek cum yodel, takes a backseat to more straightforward singing. It is true that Ono's voice is not a typically strong one, but that fragility reflects different elements and allows for other feelings to become part of the music. (Good singing can obscure the point of a song sometimes just as much as bad.) The songs here are not uniformly amazing, let's be honest. Some of them are just OK and as a double album, perhaps some (a fair amount of) editing would have benefited. But there are some outright great tunes - one of my favourites is Death of Samantha. It concerns the efforts a person will go through to look like they are OK, when they are dying inside. Here, the frailty of her voice adds to the delicacy of the lyrics.
Lyrically, she has a directness that is refreshing. Check out I Felt Like Smashing My Face In a Clear Glass Window concerning the alienation she felt in respect to her parents. All over a jaunty rock'n'roll tune, no less. Or What a Waste, even more jaunty, engages with the inanity of anti-abortion campaigners, and how perhaps it would be better for women to withhold sex until men begin to understand the true meaning of equality. There was no-one quite like her and it is plain that she brings so much to the party.
So can we quit harping on about her now? It's really silly.
* Would she have been SO criticised if she were male or white? White, maybe - male, certainly not - especially the riding John's coat-tail trope. (Especially since she had a respectable career in conceptual art long before she met John!)
The Award for the Best Cover Art
Mustafa Ozkent - Genclik Ile Elele
This little nugget deserves our attention for at least one reason - it is my very very favourite album cover ever. I mean just look at it. A chimp, all dressed in a nice yellow sweater, hosting a radio show, with loads of unravelled tape! Hilarious! And the dynamic, exciting, genre tags - rhythm and soul, blues and jazz, rock and pop. Total nonsense of course, but it's hard not to love this sleeve.
The record, well, it's OK. It's kind of funky, 70s, europop. It's the sort of music that people danced to in movies from 1971; movies that thought they were cooler than they actually were. That or music from TV montage sequences. It's crisp and the drumming is on point - you have to give it that. The second track in particular could have been an awesome break-beat. But in truth, the sleeve is much better than the album. I don't begrudge the album space in my collection - there are far worse records hanging around, but it's never going to make a best of list. But it is the very essential of remarkable - I like to remark about it!
The Award for the Best Riffage
King Crimson - Larks Tongues in Aspic
That's all I have to say, really.
Award for Having the Most Instruments You've Never Heard Of Before
Planxty - Planxty
Apparently no-one is quite sure what 'planxty' means. The sleeve notes suggest that it might be a corruption of 'sláinte', which means 'good health'. It might often be given to a particular tunes, as it is here for track 3, Planxty Irwin. I don't know anything about that, but I do know that this is one of the three best Irish folk albums I know of (the others being The Dubliners' debut and Sweeney's Men's second album Dreams for Me). It's possible, I suppose that there are better, but I hope to never find them as my head might explode. There's only so much awesomeness I can handle.
It was inevitable that Planxty were going to be good since they were comprised of serious talent. Andy Irvine had come from the aforementioned Sweeney's Men. Christy Moore had already made a name for himself on the London folk scene. Both Donal Lunny and Liam O'Flynn had established themselves as first class session players of the bouzouki and the uilleann pipe respectively. While they fixed themselves on traditional Irish music, they imbued it with energy, vigour and atmosphere, somehow finding a way of marrying the purism of tradition with the dynamism typical of contemporary rock music. Perhaps the best illustration of this for me is their version of The Blacksmith. It's a classic traditional tune, and this is one of the best versions I know. The bulk of the song is sung over guitar and mandolin (or what I take to be a mandolin anyway), but at the end pipes and drum come in, and it is awesome.
Award for Token Jazz Inclusion
Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
Who's cool as fuck? Herbie Hancock. That's who. He was a prodigy at 11, joined Donald Byrd in '61 and Miles Davis shortly after. He played with Davis for five years before going solo. This album, Head Hunters, was the biggest selling jazz album to this point. He veered between fusion and acoustic jazz by way of classic electro single Rockit in '83. He's still at it. He is a bona fide genius, so far as I am concerned.
Head Hunters is seriously funky. The opener, Chameleon, kicks off with squidgy bass and then jittery guitars, all wah-wahhed up (I don't know the proper terminology). When the horns kick in, we're a step and a half from Stevie. If you're sitting still, you might be dead. The version of Watermelon Man is impossible to resist, all pipes and bass and killer drums. This is happy time music. Sly is back on more traditional jazzy territory, lots of skittering rhythms and changes - still, it is super cool and feels like a 70s film noir set in a lagoon. Album closer, the strangely titled Vein Melter, cools everything right down and is smokey and comforting. One of my top 3 straight jazz (i.e. not vocal) records.
The Award for Girl Group Least Likely to Yell 'Girl Power'
The Three Degrees - The Three Degrees
There were plenty of girl groups in the 70s - some great groups like Love Unlimited, Labelle, The Supremes (sans Ms. Ross, of course). But for a little while, the top of the pile were Philadelphia International's own The Three Degrees - Prince Charles' favourites.
The Philly sound favoured lush, sweet soul music. It sat at the vanguard of disco, pointing in the direction of travel without ever (or at least not yet) committing to it. The Three Degrees had been recording for best part of ten years before they signed to Gamble and Huff's legendary label, including two great albums on Roulette records, where they included the psychedelic soul classic Collage. They followed a more straightforward approach at PIR and hit big money with the magnificent When Will I See You Again. It's a gorgeous song but in an era where you have Millie Jackson, Denise La Salle and Laura Lee all beginning to claim Women's Love Rights (Lee), it's horrendously passive. Dirty Old Man is better. They busy themselves calling out some undesirable attention. It's a nice tune, though. However, I most conflicted about the second track. It's a gorgeous slow jam and has a great arrangement and nice orchestration. However, it's called A Woman Needs a Good Man. It is exactly as the title suggests - for a woman to be fulfilled, she needs a man - a strong man at that. Otherwise, well, she's not going to have a great time. 'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle' this ain't.
It's a little distracting, but if you can phase it out of your mind, it's great record!
Honorary Award for Lifetime Achievement
The Beach Boys - Holland
The music business is full of injustices: people, groups and albums that have been given a bum deal. I have mixed feelings about whether The Beach Boys should be included in this - after all, everyone has heard of them, they are universally acclaimed and considered, along with The Beatles, as one the very very best groups that the sixties had to offer. And that's my point. The typical story is that they produced a slew of great singles, released Pet Sounds in 1967, the song Good Vibrations later that year, and then.... poof! Gone, disappeared.
Except they didn't. Sure Brain Wilson had a massive breakdown and the group ceased to function as it had. But they regrouped, re-purposed, other members began to pitch in songs and they re-fashioned themselves as the decade came to a close and into the 1970s. I'm not going to claim that anything they produced rivalled Pet Sounds, but they made some damned fine records that ought to have received a LOT more attention than they did.
Holland is on one of those records. It has all the lush harmonies that you would associate with The Beach Boys but the music has grown up. It is more complex both in structure and in instrumentation. It is harder, more weary and less idealistic (although every so often Mike Love comes along and scuppers that). It opens with two driving, solid numbers. Both fairly slow in tempo - they move at the pace of the steamboat they describe - but listen to the arrangement! Dennis Wilson is really coming into his own with two great songs; notably Only With You, a delicate, emotionally bared love song, which is gorgeous - one of the best soft-rock ballads of the 70s, beautifully arranged by Brother Carl.
I think that The Beach Boys have suffered an injustice. While this might be no-one's favourite Beach Boys album, more people should know it.
I'm busy working on 1974 lists now, as well as a few notes for the end of the year...
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